Saturday, February 14, 2009

Yes, a giddy romantic holiday for some, a depressing reminder of lost (or not yet found) love for others, an annoying additional gift-giving day for non-gifty spouses and SOs everywhere. I've always liked this "holiday", even when I was single and sad. My dad always gave us heart-shaped boxes full of chocolates on V-Day, so I guess I was programmed to like it.What? You're grumpy today (like the irritated bikkie above left)? Why? Did somebody give you one of these heart-bum cakes?

Or maybe one of these, um, it's a, hm. Sorry, having an Eraserhead moment...

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

I love to bake and decorate cakes. They don't always turn out super great, but they always taste good! OK, except for that one Valentine's Day cake a couple of years ago, when I decided to make mint buttercream using some apparently ancient mint flavoring left over from the Hoover administration (hubby's mom never threw anything away, and it was from her kitchen). Can we say "cough medicine cream"? after we scraped off the pretty but awful-tasting frosting, the cake was great.

Anyhoo.... Here are some early offerings from the Cake Wrecks site, which made me laugh out loud today!

Friday, February 06, 2009

Professor Latzarel's vehicle--Jim couldn't think of a better word for it--ground to a halt at the curb just as the two of them drew up to the house. It was an old Land Rover station wagon, a tremendous square thing that appeared from almost every angle to be built entirely of wood--wood covered in a coat of gray dust like the sarcophagus of an Egyptian pharaoh that had sat in the desert for a dozen centuries until, perhaps by osmosis, the wood itself had begun to metamorphose into dust. A day would come, Jim was certain of it, when the machine, wheezing along one of the interlacing highways of the southwest desert, would complete the transmutation and crumble into a quick heap to be blown across the sands by a wind devil spawned by the sudden cessation of motion. (pp. 22-23)

Thursday, February 05, 2009

Starting something new. We'll see how long it lasts. One of my New Year's Resolutions was to read more, and with that in mind I've already completed one novel and two graphic novels. When the writing's good, I'm going to try to jot down, here, a good quote from whatever I'm reading that day.

Today, I've just started (for the third or so time), "The Digging Leviathan", by James Blaylock. I'm on a William Ashbless kick, and since I just read "The Anubis Gates", by Tim Powers, for the first time, this seems a natural sequel.

From the Prologue:

(night, on the Rio Jari in the Amazon Rain forest)

Ashbless scribbled in his notebook and smoked his pipe. He considered titling his sequence of poems Amazon Moon in honor of his old friend Don Blanding. What he wanted more than anything else was a glass of Scotch and a bottle of beer to chase it with. In the corner of his right eye he could see the bottom arc of the moon, enormous in the sky. it seemed to Ashbless that he was sitting in a bowl formed of mangroves, and that the moon was a lid settling down over him...